[Scummvm-devel] Re: "Flight of the Amazon Queen"

[Gregory MONTOIR]

>>Second, as you are expanding the project to support other adventure
>>games, I wondered if someone ever thought of investigating the
>>possibility to support "Flight of the Amazon Queen"?
> 
> The general answer here is 'No'. We're already working on two new games
> (Sword 1 & 2), maintainence of three existing engines (SCUMM, Simon
> and Sky)... not to mention that most of the reverse engineering types are
> working on Residual (Grim interpreter).

Well, I started working on FOTAQ about one month ago. I didn't tell
anybody about this before, simply because I wanted to have significant
results, first.
But nevermind, here is what's done / ok :
- accessing files from the resources (queen.%d)
- preliminary file format specifications (*.msk, *.lum, *.act, *.bbk)
- demo starts but hangs at second screen (which seems normal since I did
   not completely rewrite the code to read *.cut files)

> But, that aside, there is quite a fair chance we could obtain the
> source-code for Flight. Just as it so happens, the lead programmer at
> Binary (later Gee Whiz! and now called Krome Studios, based in Brisbane
> IIRC) writes a webcomic I read occasionally. So getting in touch with him
> is easy, and as the company still-kinda-exists, there is actually a
> reasonable chance of getting it. Not to mention that John was a big fan of
> LucasArts adventures himself. :)

Well, if you think it is possible to get the source code, rewritting an
interpreter for the JASPAR engine will be a *lot* easier than doing it
by RE (I am 99% sure the engine was originally written in C).
You have an email address to get in touch with John Passfield ?

> There are a few questions that need answering first, however.
> 
> Can we absorb the code bloat from Yet Another Engine? At this point, I
> doubt it. We really need to look into dynamically loading engine modules
> at run-time. This has been on the todo list for a while, and is starting
> to get a little more urgent with the recent expansion of the codebase.
> 
> Do we WANT to support the game? Given how thinly stretched at the moment,
> if obtaining the source code is not a possibility... I'm unsure if anyone
> currently on the team is willing to do the RE work. If somebody else wants
> to send us a nice commented IDB or something.... well, we wouldn't
> complain, but I still think we are stretched a bit too thinly in this
> area.

For now, I can only provide a zip of all *cpp/*h I wrote, it's available
here : http://membres.lycos.fr/cyxdown/scummvm/fotaq/fotaq-20030826.zip.
Warning : this is *very bad* code ; but for any interested people, it
may be useful...

I am actually ready to work on FOTAQ, so if there are any volunteers
(David ?), just tell me...

Cyx